Distribution Planning

For businesses that manage the transportation of products, it is critical that a distribution planner have the ability to review upcoming shipments, then use this information to schedule the necessary delivery activities. As changes are made to these pending shipments, the planner must be able to quickly adjust the related deliveries accordingly. Food Manufacturing & Distribution's distribution planning application provides a number of tools that help you plan, manage, and record your delivery activities.

The key component of the distribution planning application is the delivery trip management functionality. This feature is used to group outbound shipments together into activities called delivery trips. Delivery trips can be created manually by the user, or generated automatically according to predefined delivery routes that are travelled by company vehicles. Depending on the level of control a company requires, activities such as picking and truck loading may be recorded as part of each delivery trip.

Additional features allow a company to further maximize efficiency throughout the distribution planning process. Pickup loads allow you to coordinate the retrieval of purchase orders from vendor locations. For customers who place the same sales orders on a regular basis, standing orders can be defined to streamline the creation of these transactions.

The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them. These tasks are listed in the order in which they are generally performed.

To	See
Organize the procurement of multiple purchases into a single pickup activity.	Work with Pickup Loads
Set up standing orders to process recurring sales requests from customers.	Establish Standing Sales Orders
Create and process delivery trips.	Delivery Trip overview
Create a link between Transfer Routes and Delivery Routes for automatic assignment of Transfer Orders to Delivery Trips	Assign a Transfer Route to a Delivery Trip